April 2, 2016 10:00PM (UTC)

There has been a lot of anxiety over the past couple of decades about teens and oral sex. Much of it can be traced back to the late 1990s, to a New York Times report that among middle-class teens, oral sex—and by “oral sex,” it meant fellatio—not only was becoming ubiquitous, but that they were engaging in it far earlier and more casually than teens’ busy (read: neglectful) working parents realized. One health educator was quoted as saying, “‘Do you spit or do you swallow?’ is a typical seventh-grade question.”

Two years later, the Washington Post covered a parent meeting called by middle school counselors in Arlington, Virginia, a town of “elegant brick homes, leafy sycamores and stone walls”— again, code for white and middle class—to discuss the fellatio craze among thirteen-year-old girls. The reporter linked that incident to a wider regional trend, based largely on “student grapevine”–generated claims of girls who had dropped to their knees during study hall or at the bac...